Month: April 2017

Coming up in July is my first ever solo exhibition. Lost Tales: Walking with Gods at the Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre, here’s the blurb.

Multidisciplinary artist, writer and creator Travis De Vries’ upcoming collection of work borrows and twists the tropes of mythology, graphic novels and traditional story telling to reimagine the stories of Australia’s First People.

A collection of new paintings, stitched together in a wall-to-wall tapestry, with prose, sculptural and audio-visual elements; Lost Tales: Walking with Gods is an opportunity to engage and experience aeons old stories in a completely new light. These works echo the studies of Joseph Campbell or the worlds of Neil Gaiman, they will resonate deep in the heart of the Australian psyche through our connection to the myths and legends of the Indigenous people; gods, demons and creature that haunt us and the clash these ideas have with the more recent western mythologies to come to Australia.

“I am creating new mythologies that grow and change all the time. Presented as a whole; each painting is connected to all of the other and together they form a story set in the small town of Glen Innes in northern New South Wales. You’ll see motifs from the local area and in this exhibition I explore the idea of gods from both western and Australian Indigenous pantheon mixing with each other and the local populace. This is a look inside the worlds that exist in my head, a sprawling place where all manner of creature from our psyche runs rampant. A god from one of the Norse pantheons has hitched ride to Australia at some time in the last couple of centuries. Whilst here though he has been in a fight with a local deity and now has amnesia, he can’t remember that he is a god. All the memories he has are hints and flashes from the old days, mostly rituals and sacrifices and that is slowly sending him insane. He wants to remember and he begins to act out the flashes of memory that he has by kidnapping local children and performing ceremonies. It’s dark, a little disturbing but I love the play between the local mythology and the introduction of western mythologies, and I love to see what happens when these things mix.”

Stay tuned, I’ll be posting some works in progress in the upcoming weeks as it gets closer to exhibition time.

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I wanted to take a moment to share some background about my new painting Darc Ridjerul after having a conversation with my partner Cloé.

The work is part of the larger exhibition Lost Tales – Walking with Gods that will be debuting later this year at the Muswellbrook Arts Centre. I guess to talk about this specific work I need to give a quick overview on the exhibition as a whole.

Lost Tales: Walking with Gods is an exploration of the aeons old stories of Australia’s First Nation people in a completely new light. In a way these works echo the studies of Joseph Campbell or the worlds of Neil Gaiman, through the connection to the myths and legends of the Indigenous people; gods, demons and creatures and utilising these beings to tell new stories or to re-visit old stories in a way that continues to make sense of them in a contemporary light. The exhibition tells a story of a Celtic god that has come over to Australia and has found a set of standing stones in the small NSW country town of Glen Innes that mirrors stone henge. The problem is that he doesn’t remember that he is a god, he has flashes of insight, of power and visions of ceremonies. He wants to get that power back and as he slowly goes mad he begins to steal children from the local populace and performs his own ceremonies as much as he can remember. Suffice it to say he is slowly going mad.

So that’s the overview of the exhibition now into this work: Darc Ridjerul.

The first thing you notice when you look at Darc Ridjerul in the flesh is that it is large and then you notice the blood. The blood is flowing from the heads and arms of three figures and it appears to be pooled at their feet or painted the rock that they are leaning (or tied) against.

Let’s forget the blood for a moment, I want to talk about the figures. Firstly there are three of them. For me this is an echo of very particularly myths that have elements that are universal. The three sisters (Australia), the three fates or Morai (Greece) and the three god brothers Zeus, Poseidon and Hades. There are tons of these things that crop up as you delve into different lore over the world. For me they all have one thing in common, in every story or legend they draw strength when the three are together but when they are split apart they lose, evil triumphs and the world is a scary place.

In Darc Ridjerul the three figures are young boys however they look like they could be old men and this is the interesting part. Something has obviously happened to them, they are twisted and they are tormented, their faces and fixed in silent screams of pain and anger but they are still together. They are in their own way still strong.

In the overarching storyline of this work the three figures have been/ are being sacrificed by a god in his attempt to regain his power. He has captured them, tortured them and now is draining them of their blood, but he also changed them. They are becoming twisted and are growing into something more just flesh; they are becoming symbols.

Finding the standing stones recreated in this small country town in Australia was incredibly mind opening. It was like the people that had migrated here had brought that part of their old world with them, needing to re-erect in this strange new land. Needing that symbol to feel at home.